Computer resources

Every computer software consumes computer resources - it occupies some space on disk, it consumes CPU and RAM when it is running. Database connections, reading and query execution may produce database workload and consume network bandwidth. It may be important to know about this stuff, in order to understand what kind of resource consumption is expected.

Internet

All possible internet consumption is described in detail in the Our online services section.

Other network and database connectivity

You may choose to connect to the database located on the network. Database operations are performed each time you read objects, merge objects, compare data, prepare and run data synchronization scripts, refresh objects or data.

It worth to mention couple of non-obvious cases when application does NOT connect to database:

when you scroll thru data merge script items the results are taken from the local cache (see below notes for Disk)
when you scroll resultset in the Query result diff for query providing multiple tables, the result is taken from RAM

Disk (SSD or HDD)

When you install an application, its binary files are extracted to the folder specified during installation (defaults to "c:\Program Files (x86)\MssqlMerge" for per-machine installation). Application is pretty compact, binary files do not take more than 10 megabytes

In addition to Program Files, application uses the following folders and files:

Application settings file, located at "c:\Users\your_profile_folder\AppData\Roaming\MssqlMerge\Settings.xml". This file holds your license key, recent databases list and other application settings. Please note that manual edit of this file can break application start.
Application is using temporary local cache for two types of things:
- Large objects retrieved by the Data diff (strings and binaries)
- Prepared data merge scripts before they are executed or saved to file or copied to clipboard
These files are created in the folder configured by the Local Cache parameter on the Data Diff tab of the Settings dialog. By default is "c:\Users\your_profile_folder\AppData\Roaming\MssqlMerge\temp" folder. These files have names in format of processId_someGuid.db and automatically removed when this data is no longer needed (for example - data diff tab or merge dialog is closed). In case if an application was closed unexpectedly without appropriate local cache cleanup, additional cleanup happens on the next application run by removing old cache files - whose process id does not belong to any instance of running application.
Application error log file, located at "c:\Users\your_profile_folder\AppData\Roaming\MssqlMerge\MssqlMergeErrorLog.txt". This file is created in case of unexpected error and keeps information about the last such error. That's the same file that you can send us using the 'Unknown Error' dialog.
Diff profiles and *.msdbs files - these are additional setting files which can be created by the user. User explicitly specifies where these files should be located
If report files auto-generation is enabled then report files a created in the folder configured by the corresponding path in the 'Excel reports' parameters on the Misc. tab of the Settings dialog. Auto-generated file names are based on the current timestamp and content being processed.

RAM memory

All database object definitions and object definition diff results are stored in RAM (in the future it is going to be cached on the disk). Data for all tabs (diff results, object lists, etc) is also located in RAM.

It is specially worth to mention that all results of the Query result diff are also located in RAM and it is a significant change compared to the regular data diff. When you scroll data diff pages - new result is retrieved from DB, but when you scroll Query result diff resultsets - results are taken from RAM.

Last updated: 2023-12-01